After the Mourning by Barbara Nadel

Author:Barbara Nadel [Nadel, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2010-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

There is a very sad story associated with the Jewish cemetery on Buckingham Road, Forest Gate. Known as the West Ham cemetery, the site is enhanced by a large, round mausoleum that was built to take the body of a young woman called Evelina de Rothschild. Married to Ferdinand, of the famous banking family, poor Evelina died in childbirth in 1866 and was mourned by her husband for the rest of his life. The mausoleum is a testament to Ferdinand’s grief, which apparently turned the poor man into a recluse. It was a rather fitting place for a young and much-loved person like Alfie Rosen to be interred.

There must have been hundreds of mourners. My lad Arthur, whose aunt Flo works in the heart of the Jewish East End at one of the sweat-shops on Fashion Street, reckoned that almost every tailor and seamstress in the area had downed tools to come out for Alfie Rosen. At half past three on a winter afternoon, with Jerries expected any minute, that was quite something.

Once I’d got Doris, her mum, her sisters and Herschel Rosen to the cemetery and lowered Alfie’s coffin into the hole, I stood with my lads by the Rothschild mausoleum. After all, once Rabbi Silverman began his prayers we’d all be at sea, not having any grasp on Hebrew. All I knew was that once it was all over the male congregants would fill in the grave as opposed to the Christian custom of paying others to do it for us. The only non-Jews in the thick of the congregation were my mother and sister Nan. The Duchess held on to the arm of Doris’s mother, Sadie Mankiewicz, another long-standing widow like herself. Only Aggie didn’t make it, not because she didn’t want to but because she had to work. If you’re in munitions or food production, like Aggie, that’s a reality of your life. Nothing can interrupt the war effort.

‘Poor Doris Mankiewicz,’ Hannah whispered into my ear, when she reached my side to stand next to me.

I looked down at her and said, ‘What you doing here?’ My girl knew Doris a bit on account of their both coming from the same area, and through me, of course. But with Hannah and things Jewish, there is and always will be a problem.

‘Weren’t Sadie Mankiewicz and her family cut me off when I went with that boy,’ she said. ‘That was my parents and the rest of the frummers. This lot here ain’t like that.’

Hannah’s parents were, and always had been, very religious or frum Jews so her going off with a Gentile had effectively separated them from her. Doris and her people were not religious and therefore not nearly so scandalised. Alfie Rosen, like a lot of young Jewish men, had been totally anti-religion, and a considerable number of his mates in the congregation carried Communist flags.

While the rabbi did his stuff I watched Doris. White and, for once, thin-looking, she was being literally held on her feet by one of her younger sisters.

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